IAB Awards 2012 winner – Cornetto Enigma

20 July 2012 min read

Category: Product Launch

Product: Cornetto Enigma

Client: Unilever

Agency: Soap Creative, with Mindshare and Ensemble

Background

Unilever was launching the Cornetto Enigma, a new cone with a soft centre, into the Australian market and had to do so using an existing TV spot that featured a giant loveable bear. The launch campaign needed to drive sales of the Cornetto Enigma among the target 18-to-30 demographic with an equal male to female split.

Objectives

The campaign’s objectives were to successfully launch the Cornetto Enigma into the Australian market, to drive awareness and sales of the new product and to differentiate it from its competitor (Drumstick) in the local market. The campaign was required to utilise the existing global TV spot, while ensuring it had resonance and traction within Australia.

Strategy

Soap Creative knew that it had to find a way to both entertain and engage the demographic to create an emotional connection to the brand, and ultimately drive sales.

The agency also understood that it had to find an innovative way to leverage the existing TV spot and link the creative to the product to produce a multi-platform campaign that would cut through the competition and work as an integrated campaign.

Subverting research that indicated that Australians were a nation that struggled to express their feelings, the core campaign was built around the notion that the Enigma Bear, and by extension the soft centred ice-cream cone, would encourage Australians to reveal their soft side.

There were two main streams to the campaign: experiential and above the line, pushing to digital. The campaign took linking to the TVC to a whole new level by including a Shazam call to action in all TV spots, inviting viewers to ‘Shazam’ the song used in the commercial. With plenty of research in market indicating that the target demographic were frequently using multiple screens at any one time, the catchy tune provided an opportunity to leverage this identified behaviour and extend the creative across platforms. ‘Shazam-ing’ then took users to a mobile optimised site where they could send customised ‘soft side’ video messages via mail, MMS or social media channels.

This tapped into the target audience’s desire and proven behaviour of creating unique peer-to-peer mementos and receiving recognition for it. As the ‘soft side’ messages worked across web, email and mobile, it also delivered on the demographic’s expectation that things work across each and every device.

To bring the concept of revealing the soft side of Australians to life, a series of experiential events took place at key music events during the summer, where the target audience were highly represented and the consumption of large quantities of ice-cream was a natural fit.

In a clever use of technology, an Xbox Kinect-powered interactive installation enabled the audience to dance in front of the Kinect and see themselves transformed into the Enigma Bear live on the big screen. This was then packaged as online content. Social media was ramped up with fan acquisition and engagement programs, including giving away Soft Side Bears and uploading all the sampling photos to the Facebook page.

All activities were supported by rich-media banners, including an interactive YouTube placement where people had the chance to play a classic arcade game with the Enigma Bear.

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The launch campaign achieved impressive engagement and bottom line results: 55,000 new Facebook fans were added and 50,000 ‘Shazams’ of the television commercial set a record high for its use in Australia. Over 70,000 people viewed the video on YouTube with 270,000 eyeballs of the Kinect Installation video.

The use of the Enigma Bear to encourage Australians to embrace their ‘soft side’ clearly resonated with the audience, with 13,500 soft messages sent from the mobile site.

While the campaign scored 250,000 rich media impressions, it also hit the client’s bottom line. Sales in grocery for the quarter of launch were $8.8 million, the highest since 2007 and up from $6.6 million in the previous quarter. Sales of multi-packs were the highest on record and more than double the previous year’s results. Similar results were achieved in out of home, petrol and convenience stores, with the largest quarterly sales values and market share in over two and a half years.

The innovative use of technological integration via Shazam through the campaign earned respect from the judges, who acknowledged it was key to the viral campaign that had a real impact on sales. One judge commented: “What could have been a cookie cutter brand character was successfully imbued with humour and inventiveness across multiple platforms.” Further, the panel felt that the campaign had skilfully ensured that the Enigma Bear appealed to the equal male/female 18-to-30 target demographic, which was impressive in itself given the fact they were working with a large cuddly bear that may traditionally skew to the female audience.

The campaign’s smart leverage of the TVC across the marketing spectrum had the effect of deepening engagement and played a significant role in driving sales across retail categories. The panel liked the way the TV spot seamlessly drove the audience to the social media activities and onto the experiential activities of the events, and vice versa.

As a product launch case study, the campaign demonstrated how smart strategic thought can transcend any constraints inherent with the need to use global creative to produce a locally compelling and intelligent campaign that more than delivered.

HUBS

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